| Maine Short Play Festival | March 28 & 29 | $12 | 207.854.0065 |
It’s time once again to bring Maine’s playwrights out of their writing rooms, and to realize their creations on stage. For this month’s eighth annual Maine Short Play Festival, Acorn Productions’ reading committee — producing director Michael Levine, local Equity actor and director Harlan Baker, and Add Verb artistic director Cathy Plourde — chose 12 of the 40 plays submitted by writers around the state. The chosen scripts, each of which runs between 10 and 20 minutes, will be staged this Friday and Saturday, at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center.The plays on this year’s slate (directed by Levine, Baker, and local performer/theater educator Julie Goell) represent the work of both returning playwrights and new voices. Festival veterans John Manderino and Michael Kimball return, Manderino with Portrait of the Vampire as a Young Man, which goes existential on desire, and Kimball with The Muffin Man, in which breakfast is deconstructed. Debuts include that of recent USM grad Heather Crocker, withBalcony of a Stranger.
Some playwrights new to the Festival are well recognized playwrights and actors from elsewhere in area theater. The writer/performer team Susan Poulin and Gordon Carlisle, of Poolyle Productions, asks “To exterminate or not to exterminate?” in their script, Yellow Jackets. In actress Cathy Counts’s The Deckhand, a lobsterman and a young visitor share a complicated sunrise trip. Other scripts in the line-up include Gerald George’s Noh-ish adaptation of an old Maine ghost story, in Bailey’s Mistake; Richard Sewell’s Fishtank Poem, Fishtank Song, in which a mother and son spar over fish bowl duty; and the inter-generational vicissitudes of Linda LeRoyer’s My Mother Wears Thongs.
Farce or horror? Find out at the St. Lawrence.
On the Web
Full schedule at www.acorn-productions.org
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